Dennis Meadows, a lifelong 'system thinker' and co-author of 'Limits to Growth', warns that humanity's existence could become impossible for nature to sustain itself
By Pavel Antonov
Photo: Zsolt Bauer
Is interactive learning your new way of getting across the point of nature protection?
Photo: Zsolt Bauer
Last night in Berlin I received a UNESCO peace prize. I spoke for 20 minutes about some very serious problems and I played two games. My guess is, if you asked somebody: "You went to Meadows' ceremony, what did he have to say?" they would answer: "Well, I don't exactly remember. He got this prize and we played some games." The idea behind interactive learning comes from an old, Chinese saying: 'When I hear, I forget. When I see, I remember. When I do, I understand.' In other words, learning by doing. Environmental [sustainability] touches two issues. One is to get people to understand it, and the second is to help them convert that understanding into changed behaviour.
How does such a game work?
Cross your arms, look down and remember which one is on top. Repeat it again. Ninety-five percent of people always cross their arms the same way. Half the people put their left wrist on top, and the other half the right one. This is very interesting: Each person always does the same, but half do it one way and half do it the other. When you get into a habit you stick with it and don't change it any more. You keep doing the same thing automatically. And it's the same with our habits of using energy and generating CO2 or driving our car. They don't cause us any problems so we quit thinking of them and think about other things instead. Which is good. I mean, if we had to think hard every time we crossed our arms we'd never get anything done. You need to have habits. But now I say we have to change these habits because they don't work for us anymore. So, change your habits and cross your arms the other way!
It's difficult!
But you could do it! Try again. This shows three things about habits that apply to energy use and all other [sustainable behaviour] stuff: First, it's possible to change them. Second, you have to think about it. It doesn't happen automatically. Third, it's uncomfortable at first.
And that's the way it's going to be with these other habits that we have to change. It will be uncomfortable at first, and we have to be ready to go through a period of being uncomfortable, because otherwise we'll never manage to make a change.
Have Eastern Europeans even had time to think about practicing sustainable development and changing habits, given that they've only recently grown accustomed to higher living standards?
East Germany is such an interesting example. [The Germans] are a people who shared a language and coexisted as parts of the same country for hundreds of years. And then they were separated for 50 years. It's going to take two generations before they come back together. Culture just takes a long time to change. [Mankind] will be forced through enormous change in our lifetime. Think of what happened in Bulgaria, for example, between 1870 and today. It had been part of the Ottoman Empire, and is now part of the EU. That's a big change of lifestyle, culture, politics, political liberty, living standards, literacy — all these things. Those developments are less significant than what you will see within the next 30 years. There are many changes coming, but the two that I think are going to be the most compelling are climate change and energy depletion. You simply cannot use energy that you don't have! So we're going to change in a way that causes us to use less energy. There is no way that this planet can support six-and-a-half or eight billion people without fossil fuels.
Will that bring great loss of human life?
Yes, and no. Part of humankind dies every year anyway. We are all going to die sooner or later, but the key point is that global population is going to come back down again. As to when, it's an interesting question, as it depends on so many things. It depends on attitudes towards equity. If you want to have the same living standard for everyone, or if you want to have a few rich people and a lot of poor. That [choice] has a big influence on how many people can live on this planet. Population is going to come down, absolutely! It can come down in two ways: Either we reduce the birth rate, or nature increases the death rate.
But how soon? How do complex systems change over time? That's my specialty. I don't see any basis for hoping that humanity is going to look ahead and make the changes by free will. I think the changes will come because they are forced on us. It doesn't mean a catastrophe. It doesn't mean that species are going to disappear off the face of the earth. It means we're facing a period of intensive change, which will give us two generic options. The rich and the powerful can try to keep their standard of living in the short term and screw everybody else. Or we can say: 'Listen. We're all in this together, and we need to cut back and share and try to get through this period.' The latter would be a more attractive outcome.
How will policymakers cope with this?
I recently bet 1,000 euros that there will be rationing of automobile gas in Germany before 2020. Because gas is going to become very expensive. And in a political system like Germany it's not accepted for the rich to get everything they want and the poor to get nothing. Germany or France won't permit that. But in Kenya or Somalia, or maybe in Russia, I don't know ... When I made that bet, gas was about 50 dollars a barrel, and now it's 100 dollars a barrel. In three years it will be 200 dollars a barrel. It's just going up.
Have politicians reacted too late?
Yes, it is too late. I was in this very same room [of the Hungarian Science Academy] in the 1970s, talking about the big problems we were going to face by the end of the century. I have spoken at many such conferences. Nothing happened! This is the discussion we were having 30 years ago. Politicians are living in a fantasy. Humanity is now far above the long-term carrying capacity of this planet. Certainly physical growth is going to stop sometime in the coming years. You hear now about water scarcity and are starting to hear about food scarcity. But the big challenges are climate and energy.
The IPCC and the Kyoto accord are based on the idea that we need to stabilise at 450 [particles per metre] of CO2 to keep temperature from rising more than 2 degrees [Celsius]. It's a fantasy. We already have 0.7 of a degree of global warming and ecosystems are running far out of control. Sea levels are coming up, Arctic ice has lost 80 percent of its mass, and droughts are becoming more of a problem. Forest fires. How the hell are we supposed to live with a rise of two degrees? It's not a scientific number; it's a political one. But if you tell the politicians it's too late, they say: 'Okay, then screw it. Let's eat drink and be merry, and don't ask us to make any sacrifices if it's already too late.' So, you have to tell the politicians you can still do it.
Could new technologies offer the solution?
No. I'm a scientist, a professor of engineering for many years. I have a degree in chemistry, and worked for the Atomic Energy Commission. I've done scientific research and am personally very enthusiastic about science. But it is a question of timing. We need to cope with declining energy over the next 10 years. We're not going to get radically new kinds of cars or radically new kinds of anything in a decade. It takes between 30 and 40 years for a laboratory discovery to become embedded as a useful tool. And we don't have that time. However, there's a lot of knowledge out there, and if we could pull it together and use what we already know. That would give us some interesting tools. I'm not so enthusiastic about hybrid cars. But I'm enthusiastic about bicycles. They are definitely putting out less CO2 than cars, trains, planes, stuff like that.
Is there any reason for optimism?
There is. We've been using energy so ineffectively that there are amazing ways to save without making big sacrifices of our standard of living. The technology is there for doing it. We don't need drastically new technology; we only need to use the best of what's currently available.
